Do Violent People Smile: Social Media Analysis of their Profile Pictures

Abstract

The popularity of online social platforms has also determined the emergence of violent and abusive behaviors reflecting real life issues into the digital arena. Cyberbullying, Internet banging, pedopornography, sexting are examples of these behaviors, as witnessed in the social media environments. Several studies have shown how to approximately detect those behaviors by analyzing the social interactions and in particular the content of the exchanged messages. The features considered in the models basically include detection of o ensive language through NLP techniques and vocabularies, social network structural measures and, if available, user context information. Our goal is to investigate those users who adopt offensive language and hate speech in Twitter by analyzing their profile pictures. Results show that violent people smile less and they are dominating by anger, fear and sadness.